The Religious Right’s support for Putin, an authoritarian leader who has infringed on basic liberties and the democratic process, undermined the freedom of religion, particularly for Protestants, and allowed for the creation of a Sharia law enclave where polygamy is legal, once again proves that for a certain segment of American conservatives, everything comes down to opposing homosexuality.

In short, Russia has allowed a Chechnyans to take more than one wife. This includes a forced marriage between a teenage girl and a 57-year-old chief of police.

One of polygamy’s noted defenders ended up being the country’s foremost supporter of the “homosexual propaganda” law: Yelena Mizulina. Ioffe writes:

[W]hen a lone member of the parliament proposed a law criminalizing polygamy, the initiative was duly shot down by Yelena Mizulina, the parliamentarian who was among the most vocal supporters of Russia’s anti-gay laws and other “traditional values” initiatives. Criminalizing polygamy, Mizulina said, was “absurd.” The reason for polygamy, she argued was that “there are not enough men, the kind with whom women would want to start a family and have children.” Last week, Mizulina was promoted to the upper chamber of parliament.

“Almost 50 years ago, a couple tried to purchase a home in suburban New Jersey in a neighborhood they loved, but found their efforts thwarted when the house they wanted was inexplicably pulled off the market. The couple later learned from fair housing advocates who had investigated on their behalf that the home was made unavailable to them because of their skin color. The couple’s names were Cary and Carolyn Booker. They were my parents.

“You’d think this problem is relegated to the history books. But in 2015 — today — a couple can try to purchase a home and in 31 states be told it is not available to them on the basis of their sexual orientation. More than half a century after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal government has yet to pass a large-scale law that protects Americans from discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s time for that to change.” – Sen. Cory Booker, writing in support of the Equality Act.

So it sounds like somebody needs to provide Ted Cruz (and the rest of the GOP) with a copy of the Constitution of the United States. Specifically they should highlight Article III which defines the role of the Supreme Court of the US.

Senator
and presidential hopeful Ted Cruz has repeatedly called recent Supreme
Court decisions on marriage and health care reform “tyranny.”
On Wednesday, he used his platform as chair of the Senate’s Judiciary
Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal
Courts to hold a hearing on “Supreme Court activism”
in which he said that the marriage equality ruling was “the very
definition of tyranny” and that “Justice Kennedy’s pop psychology has no
basis in the text and history of the Constitution.”

Ignoring all the technical limitations (because what the Post is calling for is nothing short of magic); it is not illegal to lock the door on your house at night. The Police do not have a master key to each lock in the city. Purposely introducing a security vulnerability to our software, hardware, and our very lives is a preposterous idea. It seems like the folks at The Washington Post have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.

Last year, the Washington Post editorial board called for tech companies to create a “golden key”
that would decrypt otherwise secure user communications for law
enforcement. Apple, Google, Facebook, and others ignored the editorial,
coming out with end-to-end encryption for iMessage and Facetime, end-to-end encryption for Gmail, and PGP for Facebook notification emails. Now, the Washington Post is doubling down on its call for a “golden key.”

The problem noted by many last year is that a backdoor to encryption, even if euphemistically rebranded as a “front door”
or a “golden key,” is by definition a vulnerability. Building in
backdoors threatens consumers and makes them vulnerable to criminals and
hostile foreign governments alike. See, for example, the FREAK and Logjam vulnerabilities,
discovered earlier this year. The FREAK attack can allow a malicious
hacker to “steal or manipulate sensitive data” in transit—think, a
password for your online banking, a credit card number, a compromising
photo.

Both FREAK and Logjam originate out of 1990s “export-grade” cryptography—purposefully weakened encryption from the last time
the government was pushing for the kinds of “golden keys” that the
Washington Post is now advocating for. These days, not a week goes by
that another major hack makes the news: OPM, Hacking Team, Ashley Madison. All this, even without a federal mandate to purposefully make things less secure.

The
newspaper’s editorial board last week called for the National Academy
of Sciences to examine “the conflict.” In other words, the Post thinks
we had better hear both sides. “All freedoms come with limits,” the board writes,
“it seems only proper that the vast freedoms of the Internet be subject
to the same rule of law and protections that we accept for the rest of
society.”

But it’s not illegal to lock your door at night. It’s
not illegal to have a whispered conversation in a park. It’s not illegal
to walk out of sight of a CCTV camera. It’s not illegal to carry cash.

Certainly,
it is a great blow to law enforcement that some encryption cannot be
broken for them, just like it is a great blow to law enforcement that we
don’t have the telescreens from 1984 installed in our bedrooms. There
are some things law enforcement do not get to see and do not get to
have, even with a warrant. That is how things have always been, and our
society has yet to fall apart because of it.

For a long time, the
fight around online privacy has orbited around the phrase, “Get a
warrant.” But that does not mean a warrant is a magic incantation that
should conjure any information imagined and desired. The specter of
future warrants should not shape the internet exactly how law
enforcement would like it to be shaped, particularly when it put
ordinary people at risk of harm.

This distinctive cottage sits in the west
coast rainforest facing the waters of the Salish Sea. It is located on
Lummi Island in Washington, a short ferry ride from the mainland and a
couple hours drive north of Seattle. The tiny cottage recently came on
the market with an asking price of $395,000.

Ted Cruz must not have a lot of confidence in his new book, A Time For Truth.
Rather than let the book makes its way to the top on its own, he and
his publisher Harper Collins resorted to sneaky tactics to ensure high
sales. They paid people to buy the book.

In essence, The Times accused Cruz’s publisher of trying to buy its way onto the bestseller list by having a firm like Result Source hire thousands of people across America to individually purchase a copy of A Time For Truth, in the hope that some of those retailers are on the secret list of booksellers who report their sales to the Times, or that the aggregate purchasers will simply be too high for the Times to ignore.

Conservatives are furious with The New York Times, saying it
should be okay for the presidential hopeful to buy his way onto the
Bestseller List. The NYT, however, says they have “uniform standards”
they follow and these standards don’t include enticing book consumers
with cash. A Time for Truth? Hardly.